


Old Friends

by MilesHibernus



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Red Room
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-21
Updated: 2017-03-10
Packaged: 2018-09-10 22:29:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8941915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MilesHibernus/pseuds/MilesHibernus
Summary: You could at least remember me.





	1. Chapter 1

Dr. Dousti isn’t unconscious but he’s dazed.  Natasha (everyone at SHIELD calls her Natasha and she’s gotten better at thinking of herself that way) unclips her seatbelt and worms around until she can help him get loose.  On the way she slips her hand under the dash to hit the panic button.  Who knows how long it’ll take the extraction team to get here, but this situation has gone straight to hell and she needs backup. 

She’s thoroughly lost track of which direction the shot came from and she doesn’t see anyone, so the best she can do is keep Dr. Dousti between the bulk of the Jeep and her own body; the doctor’s still not tracking, slumped half-sitting against the side, and Natasha looks around but there’s no cover she can count on until she knows where the shooter is.  She’s trying to help Dr. Dousti stand when the crack of another shot reaches her at the same moment something drills through her abdomen like a white-hot wasp.  The bullet takes Dr. Dousti in the throat and he chokes, gags; Natasha sees him clap a useless hand over the wound as she staggers.  The pain is huge and everywhere and she bites down on a scream. 

Tears well in her eyes unbidden and she tries to blink them away.  Dr. Dousti is dead, still breathing but she can see the knowledge in his face, in the way his movements are slowing.  She pulls her jacket off, hissing through the stunning pain, and shoves it in a wad against the exit wound in her stomach.  Then she hears a sound, a footstep, and tries to spin to meet it but the motion makes white explode in her vision and when it clears she’s on her knees and all she sees is a ghost. 

“Yasha,” she says.  Her voice is thin, a thread spun out into the air. 

“Who the hell is Yasha?” he says with no particular expression.  Natasha can’t reply and after a second he asks, “Do you speak English?” 

She gapes, all her control gone, her training slipping from her fingers.  He kneels and reaches for her with his right hand; the left, still holding the rifle, is carefully, unthreateningly away from her.  Bright metal glints in the sun where the leather glove doesn’t cover.  “<Russian then, do you speak Russian?>” 

“Да,” she manages.  He braces her with one hand, impersonally gentle, and leans around her to survey the entry wound. He doesn’t know who she is, doesn’t know what languages she speaks. 

“<You have backup?  Support team?>” 

Natalia grits her teeth and says, “<In the city.  I hit panic button, they know I’m down.>”  He nods and stands up, bending over Dr. Dousti’s body to rummage in the Jeep.  After a second he emerges with the medkit in his hand.  He sets it in the dirt and snaps the catches open.  She thinks about shooting him.  She still has her Glocks, and he killed her engineer. 

He did it under orders, of course.  Natalia knows about doing things under orders. 

Meanwhile he pulls a thick pressure pad from the medkit and presses it into her back.  Natalia whines.  There’s no point in wasting energy on being stoic for him.  “<You’re fine,>” he says.  “<Hold this.>”  He takes one of her hands and makes her hold both bandages while he gets an Ace wrap out of the medkit; he binds the whole messy assembly to her in efficient motions and leans her against the Jeep in what little shade there is.  He even opens a bottle of water and makes her drink some of it.  His expression never changes, blank, neutral, and when he’s finished he simply stands and walks away. 

Much later, making her report from her bed in Medical, Natalia tells Fury that she wrapped her own wound before she passed out. 


	2. Chapter 2

“Going after him’s a dead end, I know, I tried,” Natasha tells Steve. She did try, but she kept finding that everyone who’d worked for the Red Room in her day was dead. Some of the deaths were natural, and some were the kind of unnatural that’s the cost of doing business, but some were impossible kills, half-mile rifle shots, men in locked rooms with their necks broken. No one who knew anything had survived. She pastes on a smirk. Steve’s a good guy, and he can’t see under her masks. “Like you said: he’s a ghost story.” She holds out the drive. Steve looks at it, meets her eyes, takes it.

“Then let’s find out what the ghost wants,” he says.

* * *

She throws a shock-disc at his arm, the only part of him it might manage to disable, and runs, a last desperate flat sprint. In Odessa she wasn’t his target; now she is, and whatever buried part moved him to help her that day, it’s inaccessible now. _Yasha, Yasha_ , she thinks wretchedly, wondering if she’d have killed him back at the viaduct if she didn’t remember the taste of his lips. Natasha is the Black Widow and sentiment shouldn’t affect her aim by even the quarter inch it had taken to hit the goggles instead of putting the bullet through his forehead, but these last several years she’s done a lot of things she shouldn’t.

She makes it about half a block before he shoots her, through-and-through in the left shoulder. She stumbles, putting a hand over the wound, and half-falls to put her back against a parked car. She looks back the way she came and there’s no sign of him, until there’s a bang and she twists in time to see him landing on the hood of a car, his gun coming up. Natasha—Natalia—would call his name, but he doesn’t know it.

Then Steve comes out of nowhere, charging, and the Winter Soldier turns to meet the attack.

* * *

Natasha would like to laugh, she really would.

Not long after Thor saved London (and by extension the world) from an invasion of literal elves, Clint said idly, “At some point our lives will have to stop getting weirder, right? There has to be a limit.” If she ever sees him again, Natasha’s going to tell him that they haven’t hit the limit yet, because it turns out that her Soldier and Steve’s lost best friend are the same man.

Steve’s on the edge of a breakdown and there’s only so much she can do; she’s sick from blood-loss and shaking from pain, and they’re all secured in accordance with their talents—which means Natasha’s handcuffs are going to have to be cut off and Steve’s sitting in a ridiculous super-soldier car seat with shackles of solid metal an inch thick that cover his wrists halfway up the forearms and his ankles to mid-shin. Natasha would bet real money that that thing was developed to transport Yasha in.

“None of that’s your fault, Steve,” she says, and she knows she sounds terrible. She feels terrible. She wishes Yasha had shot her in the head, because at least that would have been quick and she doesn’t want to die feeling so bad. 

“Even when I had nothing I had Bucky,” Steve mutters. Natasha knows she should be saying something, managing his shock, because they need Steve on his game if they’re going to have even the slimmest chance of getting out of this, but he’s hit the mental blue screen of death and she is right out of inspiration. She leans her head back and closes her eyes. It doesn’t help.

Sam says, “We need to get a doctor in here. We don’t put pressure on that wound she’s gonna bleed out right here in the truck.” _Right, medic training,_ Natasha thinks hazily. The guard nearest him brandishes a stun baton, thumbing on the charge, and Sam draws back from it.

* * *

The file she gets for Steve is all old. It won’t tell him anything that he wants to know; it will tell him everything he needs to know; it will tell him how James Buchanan Barnes became the Winter Soldier. Natasha only does it because she knows Steve couldn’t have gotten himself out of the river. Barnes pulled him out; he had to have, there was no one else. And that means that Steve might be right, or at least right enough not to die instantly if he somehow ends up within a mile of Barnes.

If Steve catches Barnes, it’ll be because Barnes wants to be caught. The only question is whether he’ll be coming in or setting a trap. But Steve’s a big boy, and Natasha can’t stay; she needs to go underground for long enough that everyone forgets the Black Widow. 

Fury asked her to come with him. She’s still grateful enough for her place in SHIELD that she didn’t laugh in his face.

She tells Steve not to pull on the thread because it’s her duty to warn him, but she knows he’s going anyway, and deep in what’s left of her heart she wishes him luck. Maybe he can bring Bucky back; maybe Bucky, unlike Yasha, was planted deeply enough that even the chair couldn’t root him out. For Steve’s sake, she hopes so. Love is for children and jealousy only uses up energy that would be better spent elsewhere, so if Steve brings his Bucky home Natasha will be nothing but happy for them.

She walks away from Nick’s empty grave and doesn’t look back.

**Author's Note:**

> Civil War didn't do much to clear up the confusion over Hydra vs the Soviets vs the Red Room, so I'm just sort of running with that.


End file.
